Mimesis (54 page)

We now come to the last part of our text. It is concerned with the unity which in his case exists between the work and the author, in contrast to the specialists, who exhibit a fund of professional knowledge but loosely related to their person. He says the same thing, with some different nuances, in another passage (2, 18, p. 666):
Je n’ay pas plus faict mon livre que mon livre m’a faict: livre consubstantiel à son autheur, d’une occupation propre, membre de ma vie, non d’une occupation et fin tierce et estrangiere, comme tous autres livres
. Nothing need be added to that. But his malice against the erudite expert and against specialization requires some comment, with a view to determining the historical position of such utterances. The ideal of a non-specialized man, a man developed on all sides, reached humanism from both the theory and the example of antiquity, but the social structure of the sixteenth century did not permit its full realization. Furthermore, it was precisely the effort required by the rediscovery
of the heritage of antiquity which brought into existence a new type of humanist expert and specialist. Rabelais may still have been convinced that perfect personal culture was necessarily identical with the mastery of all branches of knowledge, that universality, then, was the sum of all specialized erudition. Possibly his surrealistic program of education for Gargantua was meant to be taken seriously in this sense. In any case, it could not be achieved; and the scientific labor that had to be performed is now subjected, far more than in the Middle Ages, to a progressive specialization. In diametric contrast to this is the ideal of an all-around and uniformly perfected personality. This ideal was the more influential since it was not upheld by humanism alone; it was also supported by the late feudal idea of the perfect courtier, which was revived by absolutism and enriched by Platonizing tendencies. Then too, with the growth of wealth and the wider diffusion of elementary education, there was a great increase in the number of those—partly noblemen and partly members of the urban bourgeoisie—who, aspiring to participation in cultural life, required a form of knowledge which should not be specialized erudition. Thus there arose a nonprofessional, strongly social, and even fashionable form of general knowledge. It was, of course, not encyclopedic in range although it represents as it were an extract from all branches of knowledge, with a pronounced preference for the literary and for the aesthetic generally; humanism, indeed, was itself in a position to furnish most of the material. Thus arose the class of those who were later to be called “the educated.” Since it was recruited from the socially and economically most influential circles, to whom good breeding and conduct in the fashionable sense, amiability in social intercourse, aptitude for human contact, and presence of mind meant more than any specialized competence; since in such circles, even when their origin was middle class, feudal and knightly value concepts were still dominant; since these were supported by the classicizing ideals of humanism insofar as the ruling classes of antiquity had also regarded preoccupation with art and science not as a professional matter but as
otium
, as an ornament indispensable for the man destined to the most general life and to political leadership: there soon resulted a sort of contempt for professional specialization. The scholar committed to a particular discipline and, in general, the individual committed to a particular profession or trade—the human individual who was fully absorbed in his specialized knowledge and revealed the fact in his behavior and in his conversation—was considered comic, inferior, and plebeian. This
attitude attained its fullest development with the French absolutism of the seventeenth century, and we shall have to speak of it in greater detail hereafter, since it contributed to no small extent to the ideal of a separation of styles which dominates French classicism. For the more general a man’s culture and the less it recognizes a specialized knowledge and a specialized activity, at least as a point of departure for a more general survey of things, the further removed from the sphere of the concrete, the lifelike, and the practical will be the type of all-around perfection striven after.

In this development—although it certainly would not have been to his liking—Montaigne has an important place. His
homme suffisant
who is
suffisant
always,
même à ignorer
, is doubtless a predecessor of that
honnête homme
who—like Molière’s marquises—need not have learned anything in particular in order to judge everything with fashionable assurance. After all, Montaigne is the first author who wrote for the educated stratum just described; by the success of the Essays the educated public first revealed its existence. Montaigne does not write for a particular class, nor for a particular profession, nor for “the people,” nor for Christians; he writes for no party; he does not consider himself a poet; he writes the first work of lay introspection, and lo!, there were people—men and women—who felt that they were spoken to. Some of the humanist translators—especially Amyot, whom Montaigne praises for it—had prepared the way. Yet as an independent writer, Montaigne is the first. And so it is only natural that his ideas of personal culture are those adapted to that first stratum of educated people who were still eminently aristocratic and not yet obliged to do specialized work. To be sure, in his case this does not imply that his own culture and way of life became abstract, void of reality, remote from random everyday events, and “style-separating.” Precisely the opposite is true. His fortunate and richly gifted nature required no practical duties and no intellectual activity within a specialized subject in order to remain close to reality. From one instant to the next, as it were, it specialized in something else; every instant it probed another impression and did so with a concreteness which the century of the
honnête homme
would certainly have considered unseemly. Or we might say: he specialized in his own self, in his random personal existence as a whole. Thus his
homme suffisant
is after all not as yet the
honnête homme
; he is “a whole man.” Furthermore, Montaigne lived at a time when absolutism, with its leveling effect and consequent standardization of the form of life of the
honnête homme
, was not yet fully developed. This
is the reason why, though Montaigne occupies an important place in the prehistory of this form of life, he is still outside of it.

The text we have analyzed is a good point of departure for a conscious comprehension of the largest possible number of the themes and attitudes in Montaigne’s undertaking, the portrayal of his own random personal life as a whole. He displays himself in complete seriousness, in order to illuminate the general conditions of human existence. He displays himself embedded in the random contingencies of his life and deals indiscriminately with the fluctuating movements of his consciousness, and it is precisely his random indiscriminateness that constitutes his method. He speaks of a thousand things and one easily leads to another. Whether he relates an anecdote, discusses his daily occupations, ponders a moral precept of antiquity, or anticipatorily savors the sensation of his own death, he hardly changes his tone; it is all the same to him. And the tone he uses is on the whole that of a lively but unexcited and very richly nuanced conversation. We can hardly call it a monologue for we constantly get the impression that he is talking to someone. We almost always sense an element of irony, often a very strong one, yet it does not in the least interfere with the spontaneous sincerity which radiates from every line. He is never grandiose or rhetorical; the dignity of his subject matter never makes him renounce an earthy popular turn of expression or an image taken from everyday life. The upper limit of his style is, as we noted above, the earnestness which prevails almost throughout our text, particularly in the second paragraph. It makes itself felt here—as it frequently does elsewhere—through boldly contrasted and usually antithetic clauses together with distinct and striking formulations. Yet sometimes there is an almost poetic movement too, as in the passage from 2, 6 which we quoted above on page 292f. The
profondeurs opaques
are almost lyrical, yet he immediately interrupts the long poetic rhythm by the energetic and conversational
ouy
. A really elevated tone is foreign to him, he wants none of it; he is made to be completely at ease on a level of tone which he himself characterizes as
stile comique et privé
(1, 40, p. 485). This is unmistakably an allusion to the realistic style of antique comedy, the
sermo pedester
or
humilis
, and similar allusions occur in large numbers. But the content he presents is in no sense comic; it is the
humaine condition
with all its burdens, pitfalls, and problems, with all its essential insecurity, with all the creatural bonds which confine it. Animal existence, and the death which is inseparable from it, appear in frightening palpability, in gruesome suggestiveness.
No doubt such a creatural realism would be inconceivable without the preparatory Christian conception of man, especially in the form it took during the later Middle Ages. And Montaigne is aware of this too. He is aware that his extremely concrete linking of mind and body is related to Christian views of man. But it is also true that his creatural realism has broken through the Christian frame within which it arose. Life on earth is no longer the figure of the life beyond; he can no longer permit himself to scorn and neglect the here for the sake of a there. Life on earth is the only one he has. He wants to savor it to the last drop:
car enfin c’est nostre estre, c’est nostre tout
(2, 3, p. 47). To live here is his purpose and his art, and the way he wants this to be understood is very simple but in no sense trivial. It entails first of all emancipating oneself from everything that might waste or hinder the enjoyment of life, that might divert the living man’s attention from himself. For
c’est chose tendre que la vie, et aysée à troubler
(3, 9, p. 334). It is necessary to keep oneself free, to preserve oneself for one’s own life, to withdraw from the all-too binding obligations of the world’s affairs, not to tie oneself down to this, that, or the other:
la plus grande chose du monde c’est de sçavoir estre à soy
(1, 39, pp. 464-465). All this is serious and fundamental enough; it is much too high for the
sermo humilis
as understood in antique theory, and yet it could not be expressed in an elevated rhetorical style, without any concrete portrayal of the everyday; the mixture of styles is creatural and Christian. But the attitude is no longer Christian and medieval. One hesitates to call it antique either; for that, it is too rooted in the realm of the concrete. And still another point must here be considered. Montaigne’s emancipation from the Christian conceptual schema did not—despite his exact knowledge and continuous study of antique culture—simply put him back among the ideas and conditions among which men of his sort had lived in the days of Cicero or Plutarch. His newly acquired freedom was much more exciting, much more of the historical moment, directly connected with the feeling of insecurity. The disconcerting abundance of phenomena which now claimed the attention of men seemed overwhelming. The world—both outer world and inner world—seemed immense, boundless, incomprehensible. The need to orient oneself in it seemed hard to satisfy and yet urgent. True enough, among all the important and at times as it were more than life-sized personages of his century, Montaigne is the calmest. He has enough of substance and elasticity in himself, he possesses a natural moderation, and has little need of security since it always reestablishes itself spontaneously
within him. He is further helped by his resignedly negative attitude toward the study of nature, his unswerving aspiration toward nothing but his own self. However, his book manifests the excitement which sprang from the sudden and tremendous enrichment of the world picture and from the presentiment of the yet untapped possibilities the world contained. And—still more significant—among all his contemporaries he had the clearest conception of the problem of man’s self-orientation; that is, the task of making oneself at home in existence without fixed points of support. In him for the first time, man’s life—the random personal life as a whole—becomes problematic in the modern sense. That is all one dares to say. His irony, his dislike of big words, his calm way of being profoundly at ease with himself, prevent him from pushing on beyond the limits of the problematic and into the realm of the tragic, which is already unmistakably apparent in let us say the work of Michelangelo and which, during the generation following Montaigne’s, is to break through in literary form in several places in Europe. It has often been said that the tragic was unknown to the Christian Middle Ages. It might be more exact to put it that for the Middle Ages the tragic was contained in the tragedy of Christ. (The expression “tragedy of Christ,” is no modern license. It finds support in Boethius and in Honorius Augustodunensis.) But now the tragic appears as the highly personal tragedy of the individual, and moreover, compared with antiquity, as far less restricted by traditional ideas of the limits of fate, the cosmos, natural forces, political forms, and man’s inner being. We said before that the tragic is not yet to be found in Montaigne’s work; he shuns it. He is too dispassionate, too unrhetorical, too ironic, and indeed too easy-going, if this term can be used in a dignified sense. He conceives himself too calmly, despite all his probing into his own insecurity. Whether this is a weakness or a strength is a question I shall not try to answer. In any case, this peculiar equilibrium of his being prevents the tragic, the possibility of which is inherent in his image of man, from coming to expression in his work.

13

THE WEARY PRINCE

Prince Henry
: Before God, I am exceeding weary.

Poins
: Is it come to that? I had thought weariness durst not have attached one of so high blood.

Prince Henry
: Faith, it does me; though it discolours the complexion of my greatness to acknowledge it. Does it not show vilely in me to desire small beer?